Why you always need to scrape your bowl

For my birthday I gave myself the gift of a new stand mixer, and my mom purchased a flexible-edge beater to go along with it (thanks, Mom!). I figured that the beater’s rubber edge would completely eliminate the annoying and sometimes cumbersome step of scraping the mixing bowl while making doughs and batters. I was wrong. The first cake I made ended up with huge holes and sunken pockets, both telltale signs of undermixed batter. As Stella Parks of Serious Eats reminds us, scraping down the bowl is an important step.

Parks explains the problems that can arise in cookie making when the bowl is not scraped while creaming the butter and sugar together. Without scraping, she says, “a dense film of butter and sugar may build up around the bowl, or clump in knots at the heart of a paddle attachment.” If clumps of improperly aerated butter and sugar find their way into your cookie dough, you will end up with misshapen, thinner, and darker cookies. Parks includes photographs so you know what the buttery film looks like, and also provides pictures of the different steps in creaming.

In addition to scraping your bowl, another tip for minimizing this film in the first place is to check the clearance of your beater to your bowl. Some mixers allow you to adjust either the beater or bowl height so the two can be as close together as possible without touching.

Photo of Malted chocolate chip-pecan cookies from Serious Eats by Stella Parks